Earlier this week during a break in the February rain, I looked out over a sparkling Swansea Bay, Mumbles boats like Saxon Lady, Loopey and Antelope basking in the morning sun behind me, the giant Meridian Quay tower seeming to shimmer in the blue waters ahead.

In the distance, the welcome sun reflected in windows in the fast-growing SA1 complex and, a little further along, it flashed off the ribs of steel girders forming the rapidly-developing structures of the £450m Swansea University seafront Bay Campus.

Seagulls swooped low over the placid scene and the chirping of songbirds conjured up thoughts of spring.

It’s difficult to take in then that exactly 73 years ago on February 21, 1941, also a Friday, Swansea was waking up but its people were still in the grip of a nightmare.

It was the morning after two nights of heavy bombing by Hitler’s Luftwaffe and shattered buildings were smouldering and in many cases still burning.

That evening, around 7.30pm, the mournful whine of air raid sirens would sound for a third day, Swansea’s St Mary’s Church, Ben Evans department store and town centre market all being hit.

A teenaged Richard Burton scribbled in his diaries of Swansea “burning” as he watched from his home across Swansea Bay in Port Talbot.

The infamous three-day blitz of Swansea began at 7.30pm on February 19, 1941, when the bomb-bay doors of dozens of black-painted German bombers swung open, a shower of high-explosive bombs joining the light snow which was falling on the frozen streets of the seaside town below.

The Germans rained down 30,000 incendiary and 800 high-explosive bombs during the three nights of terror.

Swansea, seen to burn from as far away as Devon and Cornwall, would never look the same again.

The raids left 230 Swansea residents dead and a further 409 injured, while more than 850 properties were destroyed and 11,000 buildings damaged.

The defiant Swansea spirit was summed up in the slight form of Elaine Kidwell, one of many iron-willed air-raid wardens who braved the deadly rain of falling bombs to help the injured get to safety.

She literally brushed incendiary bombs off the roof of a bank in Wind Street, running towards target areas, while others dashed for shelter and once simply dusted herself down and “applied lipstick” after being blown up by a parachute mine.

She was just 17, the youngest air raid warden in Britain, and summed up what Winston Churchill once said: “If you’re going through hell, keep going”.

Swansea’s Air Defence Monument at Quay Parade now has a now feature allowing visitors to download information about the blitz via mobile phones.